Pythagoras declared that the harmony of the spheres is not heard by the ordinary human ear either because it has always been accustomed to it from the beginning of life, or because the sound is too powerful for the capabilities of the physical ear. In substantiation of this theory it is interesting to note that modern science expresses the intervals of music by proportions similar to those which mark the tonal distances of the planets. (4) Man Self-contemplation was strongly insisted upon and played a most vital part in the Pythagorean training. To his esoteric section Pythagoras taught the immortality of the soul, its pre-existence, and its rebirth; karma; and the septenary constitution of man, partially veiled, it is true, under the form of a triple division of the soul into animal, human, and divine parts. There is a doctrine whispered in secret that man is a prisoner, who has no right to open the door and run away. The gods are our guardians. The soul is a harmony and the body its prison. We choose our own destiny and are our own good or bad fortune. Rash words and acts are their own punishment. We are our own children. Intentional perversions of the teachings of Pythagoras, mere travesties of his ideas, are plainly evident in what has come down to us in regard to his belief in metempsychosis. Thus we are told that his enemies circulated the story that Pythagoras had declared that one of his relatives had passed into a bean, a vicious joke based on the fact that beans were excluded from the Pythagorean diet. Another similar malicious fiction about Pythagoras is thus referred to by Xenophanes, a contemporary philosopher. They say that once, as passing by he saw A dog severely beaten, he did pity him, And spoke as follows to the man who beat him: "Stop now, and beat him not; since in his body, Abides the soul of a dear friend of mine, Whose voice I recognized, as he was crying." That Pythagoras, himself, did not believe in transmigration after such fashion, is shown quite plainly by the following statements of Hierocles, the Neo-Platonist in his commentary upon the _Golden Verses_ of Pythagoras: If through a shameful ignorance of the immortality of the human soul, a man should persuade himself that his soul dies with his body, he expects what can never happen; in like manner he who expects that after death he shall put on the body of a beast and become an irrational animal because of his vices, or a plant because of his dulness and stupidity--such a man, I say, acting quite contrary to those who transform the essence of man into one of the superior beings, is _infinitely deceived_ and _absolutely ignorant_ of the _essential form_ of the _soul_, which can never change; for being and continuing always man, it is only said to become God or beast by virtue or vice, though it cannot be either the one or the other.